Pink Peppercorns by Anastasia Kononenko

Ashley spits out bloody saliva

into the sink and is tempted to break the mirror.

She would gladly give anything not to be in that situation.

Because there is nothing normal about asking her colleagues for cigarettes and pining after a twenty-year-old.

She couldn't wash her clothes to get rid of the smell, and she didn't really want to. Hot water rinsed the feeling of dirt from her body, but Ashley was more aware than most that the other man's T-shirt was still microfibred in the crooks of her elbows, her hair smelled of pure tobacco and him, him, him — it was nothing but pink peppercorns, terpenes and aromatic aldehydes — and so Ashley would put her head down, pretend to be curious about what was happening in the sky, throw her head back sharply, close her eyes and finally inhale. And breathe in the salts that were falling on her, the dimethicones, the cholesterol and the terpenes, and-

Breathe, breathe, breathe him in.

Because that night, she pulls away from his lips, nuzzles his chin, and whispers softly:

“I feel nothing but guilt.”

And Aaron laughs hysterically into her mouth.

Aaron opens his mouth to say something, then, but for some reason, he just moves closer to Ashley and catches her mole with his lips. Tastes her collarbone. Feels her neck.

Ashley does not dare to move. Just smiles drunkenly and talks to him now and then:

“Why are you like this… Mysterious and...”

Aaron smells like cigarettes, pink peppercorns, sweat, and bedsheets lost somewhere at night, and Ashley fears she'll get lost in those sheets herself. She'll become a part of an inadequate coping loop and, when she wakes up in the morning, she'll silently pick up her clothes from the dirty floor and walk away, not saying a word.

That morning, Ashley could clearly distinguish one scent; it was someone else's wet cough that woke her up, and Ashley allowed herself to cough in tune with it. Her throat was torn by a cold, her nose black from the concentration of tobacco in the air, and the other man's T-shirt on her bare body was wet. Ashley didn't dare to wonder if Aaron would ever look for her, Ashley's, scent on his clothes, and if he liked the natural smell of her body, and if he turned to face her at night on purpose to accidentally exchange breaths.

Ashley tried to turn away from Aaron because it was hard to be sure of her morning breath after all she had drunk the night before. This trick caused a pile of crumbs of unknown origin to stick to her bare legs. She didn't want to imagine how they would stick to her damp calves and how her skin would react, and, to be honest, she couldn't — for some reason, Ashley was convinced that even if she licked the pile of sand and hair off the threshold into Aaron's room, it would be more sterile than sitting down in street clothes on the bed of her own apartment.

She wasn't allergic to Aaron.

She would let him lick the nose pads on her glasses.

Her shoulders still felt like they were bathed in the residue of someone else's sweat, and she wished they hadn't met, wished they hadn't looked at each other at all, wished that a wardrobe had fallen on her and smashed her head, wished that Aaron mixed antidepressants with alcohol or forgotten to turn the stove off for the night — because Ashley really thought so!

Because she felt sorry for herself. She hated herself.

What she tried to clean, rather than pretend to, were her teeth. But Aaron had left scratches even on the edge of her hard palate when he fed her some chips — where did they come from? — and Ashley couldn't stop thinking about him when she lost her voice during the briefings and Zoom calls.

Ashley would rather go back in time and never meet Aaron at all.

Aaron had no idea what kind of image he portrayed. Aaron didn't really care that normal people, in Ashley's sense of normal, didn't live like this. Aaron, to be fair, couldn't care less about Ashley's understanding of normalcy, and he couldn't care less about Ashley in general.

Or so she thinks at the sink.

She has to wait a week for the dirty clothes to wait for their turn, go through the wash cycle, dry in the cool January air, and land on the windowsill as a reminder of something intimate.